Life Goes On

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘I wish you’d let me stay with you.’

  ‘It’s more than my job’s worth. But if things get desperate in London, here’s how to find me.’ I dribbled with the idea of sending her to Upper Mayhem, but couldn’t guarantee Bridgitte’s reception, so I gave her my address, care of Moggerhanger.

  ‘I know you can’t take me, and I didn’t really mean to ask. Maybe I was testing your kindness again. I shall try not to contact you in London. I’m a very proud woman.’

  We parted like old friends. I couldn’t understand why I felt depressed after I left her by the slipway. Yet a mile down the road and she was out of my mind. I thought of nipping into Nottingham for an hour or two, to drive around the old haunts in my opulent maroon Roller. Maybe I’d see Alfie Bottesford cleaning school windows; or Claudine Forkes, now married with three more kids on top of the one I’d inadvertently given her before lighting off; or Miss Gwen Bolsover with her latest incompetent and tongue-tied lover. Or I might run into – or over, if I could – old Weekly of Pitch and Blenders the estate agents who gave me the push after I’d sold Clegg’s house to the highest bidder and claimed an unofficial deposit of my own.

  Business came first. I hadn’t seen any of my Nottingham cronies for a dozen years. They could wait a bit longer for the pleasure, and so could I. Past midday I got onto the A52, and after the tangle of Derby was doing a header down the dual carriageway as far as Watling Street. Stirling Moss would have been proud of me. I was in my element at the wheel of such a car. Britain can make it. I sucked my way past two Minis and a lorry. A girl stood at an intersection thumbing a lift, black slacks and red hair, but even that didn’t tempt me to stop. In any case she was no doubt a policewoman acting as a decoy to find clues as to who had murdered a girl hitch-hiker last month.

  On Watling Street, the old Roman road, the A5, the London to Holyhead, that military ribbon laid out to keep the ancient Brits in order, I watched my compass needle swing back on the straight and narrow, heading towards more bucolic horizons. The day wore on through rain, shine and back to rain again, and beyond Shrewsbury into hilly pastures mottled with sheep.

  I stopped to buy provisions in a village shop that was so small you could hardly move, but there was a pile of supermarket baskets for you to help yourself while the woman sat at the till waiting for you to stagger over and pay. She looked sulky, thinking I only wanted a bar of chocolate, but thawed on seeing me pick up milk and bread and cheese and bacon and eggs and sausages and oranges and tea and chocolates and sugar and fags and vegetables – all to go on the expense sheet – sufficient for forty-eight hours of incarceration at Peppercorn Cottage where I was to hole up till the ten parcels were collected.

  By three o’clock I seemed to have been on the road forever, and wanted to sleep, but a downpour of hail and sleet, perfect spring weather, made me fearful of being slid off the hillside or sinking without trace in the mud if I went too far up the track to find a more hidden position where I could switch off for an hour. This was the time, I supposed, for a benzedrine or valium, or other such tablets that people swallow to keep them alert, but I had nothing like that with me and in any case had never taken drugs except an aspirin now and again. All through the sixties I thought people were crazy, the way they popped pills like Dolly Mixtures or Smarties. If I wanted to relax or blow the mind or have a great experience or find a new horizon I would either get it by my own head of steam or not at all.

  I chewed a bar of chocolate and had a smoke, comfortingly protected in the car, watching a man in oilskins and wellingtons walk along the hillside with a collie dog towards a huddle of sheep by a distant gate – a biscuit-tin picture come to life. The freezing washdown was so intense he almost disappeared. I felt deprived, looking at a man and his dog battling their way to a cottage which became visible when the hail stopped. A luminous green gap between the clouds showed the outlines of the hills and the sheen on their flanks, and I felt more at home than in the Dutch flat lands around Upper Mayhem.

  I stared at the network of lanes on the map till the approaches to my cottage-rendezvous were clear. The obvious way was to reach it from the east, but I preferred – since there weren’t so many farms on that side – to come on it from the west, which meant doing a few extra miles. By seven the light was draining away. Rain washed dead gnats off the windscreen. I was at my worst because, in spite of the Royce’s dazzlers, I was prone to see double or to see solids where there was only shadow. Pale sky above the turning drew me along a valley whose damp air I could sense but not feel, across a river, into a side valley, over a col and down again. Beyond Bishop’s Castle and Clun I did a sharp sweep to the west and, when it was dark, drove through a tunnel of light with nothing but the black sides and the roof visible. I switched off the radio and counted junctions, forks and crossroads. There was a pub at one, a telephone call box at another, a farmhouse at a third. I passed Dog End Green, Heartburn Mill, Job’s Corner, Liberty Hall, Lower Qualm and Topping Hill – or so I called them – and finally, after one wrong turning and a look at the map, I found the lane leading to Peppercorn Cottage.

  I drove through a strip of wood and along a hillside. A rabbit panicked in my headlights, but saw sense and zigzagged under a bush. The track was two bands of asphalt, grass in between brushing the underbelly of the car. A gate blocked my way and I disembarked to open it.

  The lane rose gently for a further half-mile, then came out of another scattering of trees. At the top of the slope the stars were vivid, and I wanted to get out and walk, but dipped headlights and crawled along the narrowing track, worried that if the car broke down there would be no space to turn.

  With the window down, flecks of rain hit my face and fresh air revived me. A bullock called from a field. A panel of tin clattered at some trough or hutch – from how far away I couldn’t tell. Village lights glistened like orange tinsel on a hillside. The lane descended steeply. I was close to my reference point on the large-scale map, but no house was visible.

  I got out, torch in one hand and the heavy airgun cocked in the other, hoping to catch a rabbit in a beam of light. A slug at close range, aimed in the right place, would blind or knock flat anyone posing danger. The noise of running water covered my approach. Behind, the Roller’s shadow blocked out part of the sky. No human being was near for miles. I swore at getting my trousers splashed.

  An owl hooted from the trees, and the stream rushed into a conduit under the muddy track which rose steeply beyond the dip. Then I saw a dark building to the left, a path leading to it through bushes and trees. There was space between the house and the stream to turn the car, but I was scared on each reversing manoeuvre that the back wheels would slip into the stream and get stuck, so that I needed ten minutes to get it facing outward bound.

  I waded through a barrier of high nettles and, at the threshold, shone the torch on my watch. It was nine o’clock, and felt like two in the morning. I had been on the go for seventeen hours and was, to put it mildly, clapped out. Gun at the ready, I pushed the door open with my shoe, waited for a moment, and then jumped inside.

  Nine

  A large grey rat scuffled across the beam of my torch, and my senses immediately descended to a lower level of existence. The slug I fired knocked a crater in the plaster wall, ricochetted close to my head and went out leaving a hole in the window, spraying glass onto a truckle bed.

  I lit a calor gas lamp hanging from a beam, and its hissing white light more or less illuminated the room. The damp air, one notch off being water, smelled of soil and foul rags, and I shivered with cold, sorry I hadn’t had a blow-out at some place chosen from the Good Food and Hotel Guide, which Moggerhanger kept in the car in case he needed to look after himself while on the road. I could have charged it to expenses. ‘You just don’t think,’ as Bridgitte used to say, ‘do you?’

  I set my radio going on the wonky table. An effort was necessary to create civilised comfort. At the end of the room was a huge fireplace made of boulders, by which lay a heap of n
ewspapers and a pile of logs with a blunt chopper on top. I hacked out some sticks and got a fine blaze, though a fire would have to burn for weeks to cure the dank atmosphere. Under the window stood a calor gas burner and a blackened kettle which I filled at the stream. In a cupboard I found tea (mouldy), sugar (damp) and milk (sour), all of which I threw into the bushes, and got fresh provisions from the car. The room was filled with the smell of frying bacon and eggs, boiling tomatoes and toasting bread. Within an hour of arrival I was sitting by the fire, smoking a cigarette, drinking the best mug of tea since Mike’s caff that morning and listening to a talk on the radio about a poet who killed himself while living in an isolated cottage in a remote and wooded part of the country.

  To be cut off from the world, and from all normal life, was a not unpleasant sensation, though having been brought up in a street regarded as a slum, we’d at least had a tap and a gas stove, as well as a lavatory across the yard. At this place I dug a hole with a trowel at the side of the house, crouching with an umbrella in one hand, a flashlight in the other and a roll of white paper in my teeth. I supposed some shepherd had lived here with a wife and eight kids, as happy as the midwinter was long, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of bijou gem a woman would walk into with her knickers in her hand.

  It was quiet – I will say that – except for the scratching of a rat but he, or she (they, most likely), kept a fair distance after my hello of a bullet from the door. I threw another armful of logs on the fire, then stacked the ten packages from the car in the dresser-cupboard, hoping that with its doors shut tight the rats wouldn’t get in and sample them. Above the dresser, just to give a homely touch to the place, was another pair of Moggerhanger’s framed exhortations (though these had fly shit in the corners) saying: ‘Eternal violence is the price of safety’ and ‘Morality knows no bounds’.

  I went upstairs to see what condition the bedrooms were in. One to the left had heaps of rags under the window, and I didn’t care to investigate for fear of finding a rotting tramp underneath. The rest of the room was stacked with red and white plastic bollards for organising contra-flow systems on the motorway, as well as red lights, yellow lights, road works indicators, men-at-work triangles and police ‘Go-slow’ signs. It was as if someone had broken into the Highway Code, because my torch also lit up the happy insignia of two children hand in hand on their way to school; a deer leaping merrily across the road; a nightmare avalanche of rocks hitting a car roof and the sign of a car halfway sunk in water after driving off the quay. Another showed a bus caught between the two jaws of a drawbridge, people spilling out with arms waving.

  Fuck this, I said, let me go downstairs; but first I looked in the room opposite. On a low table between two iron beds stood a copse of bottles with candles stuck in their tops. The carpet was so covered with patches of grease that I resisted walking on it in case I slipped and broke my neck. A spider as big as an ashtray scooted across the room, but he seemed friendly compared to the rats twittering by the skirting boards, because he came slowly back to have a look at me.

  I pulled the truckle bed in front of the fire, and lay down fully clothed. The blankets weighed like a bearskin that had been forty years in a damp pawnshop. The swollen brook was reinforced by rain which first beat against the windows above my head. The door was so badly fitted, or warped, that wind drove through and kept the room cold.

  It was hard to sleep, due to the two mugs of strong tea and the fact that there were at least half a dozen rats scratching and squeaking behind the skirting boards as they held a council of war. I read the Riot Act in rat language and fired a slug towards a pair of beady eyes, which brought quiet for a few minutes, though the shot, having missed its target, tore down another square foot of plaster. The prevalence of so many rats led me to wonder whether the time wasn’t far off when conventional weapons would no longer be appropriate, and I would have to go nuclear. Fortunately such an option was beyond my capability, and all I could do was reload the gun and lay it on the floor beside the bed. It would serve Moggerhanger right if the house was reduced to a ruin, for not providing a cosier relay post.

  The road was in front of my eyes, pot-holes which I avoided, traffic lights suddenly on red when I was going at ninety. I came out of a café to find all four tyres flat (as well as the spare); then the Roller going backwards towards a cliff, with Moggerhanger, Cottapilly, Pindarry, Kenny Dukes, Toffeebottle and Jericho Jim ready to blast me with their shotguns if it went over. Or I was driving peacefully along a leafy road when a very peculiar kind of police siren, such as I’d not heard before, came in short loud squeaks.

  Two rats scampered from the bed when I sat up. I felt my nose to see if it was still there. It was wet, though not from blood. I didn’t know whether to laugh or whisper. I laughed. They were invisible in the dark. Their eyes glowed, but their arses didn’t as they ran away. I shone the torch around the room and fired another slug at where their hole might be, just to show who was the boss as I wiped cold sweat from my face. I felt like an officer in the trenches in the Great War, except that I thought I might desert my post and make a bid for Blighty. There was a court martial in a room made entirely of mud. The rats sat at a table and condemned me to death. The joy of life induced me to fire off a dozen slugs. The noise of the stream outside affected my bladder, so I had a piss standing on the doorstep. Then I fell asleep. The human frame could stand only so much.

  The light that woke me was like the reflection from a wall of cold porridge. I sat up, shot a rat, got out of bed, lit a fire, put a kettle on, laid sausages in the pan, then puffed at a cigar and awaited results.

  The bullet had knocked the rat’s brains out, which was not a pleasant sight before breakfast, but I swept the remains into a pan and threw them over the bushes. By the time my sausages were cooked they looked like turds swimming for dear life in a pool of fat. When I extracted the fat and threw it on the fire the room stank like Akbar’s Snackbar. I was about to tuck in when I heard someone moving upstairs. Survival, a novelty at first, was becoming a problem.

  During the day I’d intended sweeping away heaps of grit and plaster caused by my jittery gunplay. Then I would dust and wash where necessary, clean the windows to let in more light, and dry the blankets so as to make my second night a fraction cosier. But I was in no way inclined to share my abode, and if an old vagrant had shambled in during the night I was determined to get rid of him.

  I went softly up, meaning to put a slug between his eyes if he showed any fight. The cargo enclosed in the dresser was too valuable to be at the mercy of a light-fingered tramp. If it was what I was beginning to think it was he would lick that white dust off with a beatific grin and at least die happy.

  There was a noise of someone fighting his way from a cocoon of cardboard. A bottle fell on the floor and, welcoming the noise because it covered the creaking of the stairs, I leapt into the room and flattened myself at the door. Even full daylight wouldn’t let me see across the room. I seemed the only one in it, which proved how far apart my senses and feelings were.

  On the other side of the bed, by a fireplace from which a hundredweight of rusty soot had spilled like dust from a cold volcano, was a handsome brown owl, its eyes staring as if I had no right to come into its headquarters without a permit. First rats, and now an owl. Crosswise, it was almost as big as I was, and far too big even lengthwise to be out of a zoo. He was unmoving, as if my only hope was to sit down and talk matters over calmly and sensibly.

  When I made a gesture with the pistol it flapped straight for me. I ducked. It clattered around the room, scored a channel through the bank of soot, knocked over two bottles and positioned itself by the door so that I couldn’t get out. It had fed on the choicest rats – and now me. There was something human about its actions, so I couldn’t shoot. One of the windows was open, and I edged forward in a dance, hoping it would have the sense to go out the way it had come in.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have frightened it, I thought, as it flew over the trees and I cl
osed the window. Since it came every night and ate a dozen rats I should have kept it for a companion. It was just like me to scare away what would help me.

  Consoling myself with a large breakfast, I thought what a good place this would be for Bill Straw to hide in, even though it belonged to Moggerhanger who was out for his guts – far better than being locked up in Blaskin’s rafters where his skeleton would be discovered in fifty years’ time when the block was knocked down for redevelopment.

  It was blinding with rain, so I stayed inside. A band of trees along the course of the brook kept the place dim, and low clouds didn’t help. I had the light on all day. A shelf nailed to the wall held a score of paperbacks, stained and full of grit, and as I shook each one separately I saw they were written by Sidney Blood. One of them, called The Crimson Tub, had underlinings and comments in the margins which proved that Kenny Dukes had been to Peppercorn Cottage.

  The light lasted only a few hours in that hidden cleft of land. After a cowboy’s lunch I lay on the bed and fell asleep for two hours, and was wakened by a rat running over my chest. I would suggest to Moggerhanger that the next courier to Peppercorn Cottage should bring a couple of tomcats from Stepney. I made tea and ate a packet of cakes, wondering how soon it would take me to go mad if I had to stay in this hotel forever.

  Wearing wellingtons and oilskins I walked up the track, though now that I dressed for the rain, it stopped. Smoke came from the chimney of a farm about a mile away. I went into a field. A rabbit, young but fully grown, looked at me, and just as it thought to move, I pressed the trigger.